Seasonal Growth
Some deeper thinking on what’s currently on my mind, plus our usual “what I’m paying attention to” stuff.
On December 30, 2025, I read Nic Antoinette’s post on her 90 day low spend experiment.
I’d already been mulling over the tension I’ve felt lately. This nagging question that keeps popping up over and over again. How much money does someone actually need?
In October 2025, I listened to Scene On Radio’s season on Capitalism. Its origins. How this system came to be. And they had a very clear definition of Capitalism I had never heard articulated. Paraphrasing in my own words:
Capitalism is a system where capital (money) is used to make more capital (more money). Either your money is making you money or you are trading time for money (wages or salary).
(Before you hit unsubscribe, this isn’t an anticapitalist screed.)
Capitalism is not a free-market economy. Capitalism is not entrepreneurial spirit. Capitalism is a system where money is predominately used to make more money.
I have felt a growing, previously inexplicable pressure for growth. Growth at all costs. Just grow. Grow for the sake of growing. In 2025, I realized that this pressure is largely coming from the systems we all live and breathe. If we are not growing, after all, we are dying.
In 2025, I stopped believing that is true.
In nature, this is not true. Human bodies do not infinitely grow. They stop growing. Then they begin a long process of repair and maintenance.
Deciduous trees do not grow all year long. They shed their leaves, which create ecosystems for all kinds of other creatures. They hibernate.
Bears, notoriously, hibernate. They fatten up, and then get very skinny while sleeping the winter away to repeat this process every year.
Note how nature rests? Nature doesn’t focus on infinite growth.
In 2025, more than ever, I started to question if infinite growth is healthy and wise. If we grow, but we burn out the entire team to do it and they all quit, is that good? Is it wise? Is it the right thing to do for the business? For the rest of the rest of society?
My answer was no. No, it is not good. It isn’t good in the short term. It isn’t good in the long term.
In 2025, I (unintentionally?) gave up trying to “grow” myself. It’s not that I don’t want to learn new things, or find new skills. It’s that my approach to growth has been broken. When you spend a year trying to survive, you come back to what you know works.
The “I can’t keep up” feeling.
I was recently chatting with a friend, who mentioned they couldn’t keep up with all the product management learning - all the podcasts, all the Lenny interviews, the Shreyas posts…all of it was too much.
I am in the same boat.
I stopped listening to product management podcasts in 2025. It’s not that I don’t care about learning the latest techniques. It’s that I cannot keep up. Even listening to Lenny’s 1-2 episodes a week is too much noise to sort through.
One of my favorite Shreyas Doshi quotes is, roughly:
Blindly adopting frameworks leaves out the context in which the framework worked.
I truly believe frameworks are valuable. And figuring out how to adapt, adjust and utilize that framework in your context takes more time than blindly listening to…checks notes…”Zapier's CEO shares his personal AI stack.”1
While I am sure there is value in how they use AI and their AI stack, the important thing is not blindly adopting their AI stack. The important thing is to glean what works for you in your context. To do that takes time, effort and energy.
My Secret Weapon
As a product person, I lean heavily into my cognitive empathy skills.
Cognitive Empathy: the ability to understand and empathize with how someone else thinks.
Cognitive empathy is my product management super power. It allows me to think like customers and put myself in their shoes. It allows me to know what they want, and often I can predict what they will want next because I can anticipate it. All of this happens because it doesn’t feel like work to me. Yes, it’s a skill that’s been honed over 15 years building software. But it just happens automatically now.
Cognitive empathy is also the thing that has allowed me to industry hop so frequently in my career. For the last 2 years, I’ve been focused on healthcare products. Prior to that, I was at Amazon building labor management software. Prior to that, I was at a personal finance company, focused on FinTech and Marketplaces.
Pair this skill of cognitive empathy with pattern recognition and it truly becomes a strength that has allowed me to grow in my career beyond my wildest dreams.
Because I can think like customers, I can get to know them quickly, find the fastest path to winning their trust, and gradually roll that into a product that works just for them.
You also have that thing.
You also have that thing. Maybe your thing is the ability to find all of the efficiencies. Maybe your thing is knowing the one thing that has to be built. Maybe you stabilize systems, taking out the unpredictability, allowing for sustainable growth.
Your thing probably isn’t my thing - although if you have cognitive empathy as a super power, let me know!
What if - in 2026 - you experimented with doubling down on what you already know, and didn’t strive/fight/push to grow?
What if 2026 came with more ease?
What if, instead of listening to all the podcasts, you listened to the 1 or 2 that you found most helpful for what you’re going through?
What if you found one framework and stuck to it for a few months, instead of trying dozens of frameworks?
What if you made your own framework by cobbling together what you already know?
What if you already know enough?
After all, how much really is enough?
What I’m paying attention to lately
The article by Nic Antoinette. I won’t share what’s behind the paywall, but it’s worth a read. I’m doing something similar in Q1 2026, and I’ll write about that soon.
This article on The Art of Fermenting Great Ideasby Nat Elaison. Quote: “Every tweet you read, every newspaper you glance at, every show you watch, every email you skim, it’s all feeding your subconscious things to process. And whatever it’s fed, it will ferment into ideas and reactions. So if you want to come up with better ideas, you must get extremely strict about what you let in the door.” Additionally, see this post by J. Westenberg.
Craft ideas. Namely, making wall shelves and wall sconces out of papier-mâché.
I joined Simon Haisell’s slow read of War and Peace this year. There’s time for you to join if you’d like to! You can catch up.
This playlist from the lovely Whitney Simpson.
Upcoming Things
Product Group Coaching - if you are interested, please sign up for launch emails. This will be a small group of up to 8 people for bi-weekly coaching for 12 weeks. Sliding scale and payment plans will be available.
Images of God Workshop - if you are in Nashville, I’d love to see you.
I don’t hate Lenny, but his podcasts lately about “how I AI,” while interesting, aren’t all that helpful to me. I think it’s much more interesting to have a conversation with someone about how they AI where you can ask questions and see how you might adapt their system to fit your needs.
